Why frogs?
I've been told that my name, Dorota, means "Muddy Rice Paddy" in Japanese. And ask anyone in Japan where you're most likely to come across frogs, and that's what they'll tell you! So I guess I was destined to like the critters!

It originally started with a little joke my great-aunt made when she gave me a
necklace with a little frog on a lily pad pendant.
She said, "Before you find your prince, your gonna end up kissing a lot of frogs."
Well, that started it all. Being only 7 or 8, I didn't really get the joke.
She thought this was funny in itself, and afterwards she started sending me a lot of
things with frogs. Frog rings, stuffed animal frogs, chocolates with frogs on the
silver wrapper...
Anyways, friends of mine started noticing that I had a lot of frog things laying around,
and soon enough started giving me frog things themselves assuming I collect them.
Which is ok, since I like frogs anyway.
But if your looking for any sort of informative reason as to why I like frogs, there
isn't one. And if you were actually expecting to see a rational explanation as to why
anyone would like silly looking creatures with big buggy eyes as cute little pets, then you're
even weirder than I am.

The purpose of Frogland is to show that the Internet can indeed provide a wealth of useful information and still be fun. Mainly, this site is dedicated to the many teachers out there who are finding new uses for the Internet as a tool for educating youngsters. Hopefully, it will inspire some young minds to find new interest in herpetology, biology, and environmental issues...not to mention providing some inspiration for young future computer "wizzes"!

No, I don't get paid by anyone to maintain this site.
In fact, it actually costs me a lot to have such a big site! I spend about 15 hours a week dealing with Frogland...and I really don't have a rational explanation for it. I'm always glad to hear that there are enough people out there who appreciate the site, which inspires me to keep working on it. I'm hoping to raise a little bit of money through T-Shirt sales in Ye' Olde Frogge Shoppe to pay for diskspace and bandwidth useage.

I started this site in August of 1995, after Floyd, my boyfriend (now husband), bought me 2 Firebellied Toads for my birthday. (company for my african dwarf froggies- in a separate tank of course!)
At the time, I did a websearch for "frog" online in the most popular web search engines...and there were only 10 homepages that had much to do with frogs on the entire web at the time! They were either more scientifically minded, or they only touched on the subject of frogs.
So I decided I would use that as a topic, and anyways it gave me something to write about as I started to teach myself how to make web pages. But then
it seemed to get quite popular, so I figured: What the heck! The world can always use more frogs! (At the time there were also very few books available about frogs..) Besides I didn't have anything better to put up anyways.
The websites in existence at the time I started this website were:

(Orignally dedicated as a shrine to her pet frogs, this gals froggishly fun homepage has now become a great information site!)

Ookke's frog page

(Gone. Original URL:

http://www.utu.fi/~tuokoivu/

This site had some great technical info on various species of frogs. A real loss to the frog pet-owners community.)

These pages all had their fine points, but I wanted something that would reflect information, color, artwork, AND allow the site to be very accessable to kids. (Besides, how else would the world meet my lovely pet frogs!) Frogland was my attempt to answer questions I couldn't find answers to elsewhere. (In some cases, the information was actually out on the Internet already, but a bit hard to reach for people who didn't major in biology) On the otherhand, links have their place here too, as there seems no point in my repeating something that is spelled out perfectly well on another persons page. Many pages here will have some initial information, with a list of relevant links for further exploration of a given topic. The main point is that links should be meaningful and not random, there's a lot of info out there on the Web, and sometimes the hardest part is just FINDING it!
The Weird Frog Facts page was created in response to a bunch of great questions sent in by kids at the Middle Room at District 48 in Madison County.
Today there are more Frog pages than I can count! I used to try to keep all frog sites listed in a section called The Leaping Pad, but then the sites just got too numerous to list. Plus, eventually, I ran out of time to handle the ever changing nature of website links. But luckily, there are now really great search engines out there like Google which make it more possible to actually find all of these web sites.

If I were to start a website today, I think I would choose a different topic...I'm amazed at how many folks are starting to copy my site now...when there are so many other interesting topics that would be great added to the web if only someone was willing to make the time investment. (Other animals for example! I had a really tough time finding monkey drawings when I was doing some research for our wedding theme!)

As Frogland grew, more and more mail came in...Since then, I've been adding information, pictures, jokes, the Coloring Book for kids, and anything else I can come up with to the site!

In August of 1999, I FINALLY got around to registering a new domain name, so visitors can more easily remember how to find Frogland. (Unfortunately, it took me so long that frogland.org, .com, and .net were already taken!) Now, Frogland's new address is at AllAboutFrogs.org

If anyone out there has any suggestions, (OTHER THAN chat rooms, because I can't monitor chat rooms so there's actually a technical reason for why I dont have one) please feel free to contact me!

You can read about all the graphics in this site here.Please read it if you plan on using any images in your webpage!!

Copyright issues: Be really careful when swiping images off other peoples pages!! Generally
speaking, it's a good idea to ask first, and you should credit sources whenever possible, or leave
a link somewhere in your site to that page.(common courtesy) It can be very disheartening when you see
an image you drew show up on someone elses page without any kind of reference to where they got it from!
Some people can get downright angry even!
Please see my Notes about Copyrights for more info.

HTML: Here's my list of HTML Bookmarks when making web sites, feel free to use
it also!